Food products such as pickles, carrots and the like frequently are split lengthwise during the processing operation. One type of slicer suitable for this purpose is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,848,498 identified herein. In this apparatus the product is fed into a cutter comprising a plurality of power-driven rotary blades positioned to extend radially inward towards a common center line so as to segment the product lengthwise.
As recognized in this previous patent, the individual products vary in size and if not fed such that each product's longitudinal axis coincides with the cutter center line, the segments resulting from the cut will be unequal in size. In fact with only a slight variance in article size there will result some small slivers from each article cut because the cut center line will be near one surface of the article. Naturally such cuts result in waste and in a less attractive appearance in the case of pickles and the like.
In the patent previously mentioned, there was provided means for manually varying the relative positions of the power-driven disc blades and the feeding means so as to alter the relative height and angle between the cutter center line and the article feed line thereby to enable regulation of the configuration of the segments resulting from these sliced articles. While such adjustments made manually are effective if the articles being cut are of uniform size, there still exists the problem of cutting articles of random sizes during the same run. A partial solution to this problem involves grading the articles by size, however this is a time-consuming and expensive operation.
It is the purpose of the present invention to provide a feed device for use with slicers to automatically center articles of varying sizes so that the segments resulting from the cut will be near equal size.